Green light to build new council homes – 150 years on from the first

Liverpool – the city which built the first council houses in Europe 150 years ago – has been given the green light to construct a new generation of local authority homes for the 21st century.The Government has confirmed that the local authority can build properties for the first time in more than 30 years, after confirming that it will not need the council to repay the housing debt of £735 million that was written off when the city council transferred the last of its stock to housing associations in the late 2000s.In a letter to Mayor Joe Anderson, the Minister of State for Housing, Kit Malthouse, writes that he is “pleased to see the ambition and enthusiasm of a city such as Liverpool, in engaging with the urgent process of delivering the new homes that this country needs”.The announcement marks a return to house building for the local authority, which in 1869 embarked on constructing the first council housing in Europe to tackle issues with sanitation and poor health.St Martin’s Cottages on Ashfield Street in Vauxhall were tenements and survived until 1977 when they were demolished.The first properties to form part of the council’s housing scheme will be a small number of properties that have been refurbished on Webster Road in Picton.The council is now working up further plans for an initial phase of houses, which will contribute to the city’s need to develop 30,000 new homes by 2030.